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Back in June, the Orange County Bias Free Policing Coalition submitted a petition to the Chapel Hill Town Council with eleven recommendations for addressing racial bias in policing. You may have been wondering what ever happened to that petition. We were. We found out last night.

The Northside Neighborhood Initiative was launched on March 9, 2015 as a partnership between the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving & Making History, Self-Help Credit Union, UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Town of Chapel Hill. You can read more about that launch in a prior story on OrangePolitics written by Hudson Vaughn, Assistant Director of the Jackson Center.

Today a celebration was held that included an update on the progress of that Initiative to keep homes affordable, help long-time residents to stay in their homes, and foster good relationships between permanent residents and students. The highlights included:

• Three homes have been purchased through the Initiative.
• 31 homes have received repairs.
• Noise complaints have dropped by 60%.

A summary of the event can be found below in the Storify of the tweets, including details of the work that Orange County Habitat for Humanity is doing to increase the supply of affordable homes in the community.

It seems like a cornerstone assumption of any democratic process that the more people who are involved, the better. I absolutely believe this. Whether it’s registering voters, encouraging people to volunteer for town boards, making avenues for giving public input easier, or asking whose voice is missing from the table any time a group of people are gathered, we all have a role to play in increasing the quantity and diversity of people who are involved in making decisions.

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to increase the quality, not just the quantity, of public input in decision-making processes. And I don’t mean berating ordinary citizens for not being public policy experts. Far from it. The responsibility to help people make better decisions sits with those people asking for the input to begin with. And in the case of local governments, the responsibility sits with the governing bodies, and by extension, the staffs, who are managing public input processes.